THIS NATION SHALL ENDURE

; The Lord has decreed that this land should be "the place of the new Jerusalem, which should come down out of heaven, and the holy sanctuary of the Lord." (Ether 13:3) Here is our nation's destiny! To serve God's eternal purposes and to prepare this land and people for America's eventual destiny, He "established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom [He] raised up unto this very purpose, and redeemed the land by the shedding of blood." (D&C 101:80.)No man, however brilliant and perceptive, shall have a complete perspective of our nation's history without this understanding and conviction. He must be persuaded by God's truth if he is to obtain an true and complete picture of our nation's origin and destiny. Secular scholarship, though useful, provides an incomplete and sometimes inaccurate view of our history. The real story of America is one that shows the hand of God in our nation's beginning. Why is it that this view of our history is almost lost in classrooms in America? Why is it that one must turn to the writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to find this view inferred or stated? The answer may perhaps be found in Abraham Lincoln's proclamation: "We have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us." (Abraham Lincoln, Proclamation for a National Fast Day, March 30) ; 0984397272